Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Home Brew

So a very good friend convinced me to brew beer at the restaurant during off hours. At first I thought sure, that would be cool if we actually did it. Then I thought, well I could use it for cooking and it would be great to further my knowledge in this simple but intricate process. We talked it over and decided a few more consequential components of the brew fest were needed. 1-Time, 2-will, 3-ingredients, 4-guru (the most important), and five friends with $ & beer. After spending 80$ & 20 minutes at Jim's Home Brew the guru and I decided to take on an educational approach and take it one step at a time and start with the fundamentals. With 5 of us involved only one really knows the true methods of brewing. 1st stage in the rudiments is to achieve fermentation and a drinkable beer. We decided to use a hop extract, kicker to squeeze out another % or 2 of alcohol, English & an American Ale yeast and Irish moss to help coagulate protein and aid in purification. The guru says this is a fail proof method if sanitization is in use & procedures are correctly applied. This quick & simple process will help provide an awareness of brew procedures while learning the basic method. Next week we advance our method to a half mash by using a hop extract and whole grains and our third week we will try a full mash by using all grains.